SPEED

For the Interjection Calendar each month Montez Press invites an artist, a writer, a poet or a doer of some sorts to say things. All 12 pieces have introspection and reflection in common. They are a subjective overview of writing in the expanded field of contemporary art and writing in the year 2019. This is the Interjection Calendar 2019, the fifth collection in this series. 

With contributions by sabrina soyer, Lisa Robertson, Hatty Nestor, Adrianna Whittingham, Sondria, Claudia Pagès, Laetitia Paviani, Bella Milroy, Georgina Tyson, Son Kit, Alix Jean Vollum, Rene Matic and bleubaglife. 

Find the last 12 PDF's on montezpress.com.

What do you call a memoir that isn’t? In This Is Not a Memoir, Janette Parris incisively narrates a journey through lost high street landmarks of East and South London in a series of detailed artworks blending map, archive and anecdote with deadpan humour. Part graphic novel, part recollection, and accompanied by an in-conversation between Janette Parris and Gilane Tawadros, this is an intimate exploration of what it means to have ownership of public space, from Wimpy to Woolworth’s via Canning Town. And somewhere in the gaps, in absent moments caught gazing at the sky or a kerbside, an impression of a life emerges–or is that just what she wants you to think?

“This book by Janette Parris tells a deflationary yet expressive coming-of-age story in the East End of London. While it may seem fun and superficial, its considerable power lies in how it moves through memories and moments in a witty and light-footed way presented as a roman-à-clef. This Is Not a Memoir is particular in the way it conjures a world of the 1970s and 1980s that is lost to most of London, yet still resonates with what it means to grow up as a working class young woman who ends up at art school and becomes an artist. It is a brave book to make, but one that will be remembered.”
— Rachel Garfield, artist, Professor of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art and author of Experimental Filmmaking and Punk: Feminist Audio Visual Culture in the 1970s and 1980s (2021)

Janette Parris is an artist who investigates the contemporary urban experience, using narrative, humour and popular formats including soap opera, stand-up comedy, musical theatre, pop mu-sic, cartoons, comics and animation. Parris has exhibited widely nationally and internationally for 25 years at spaces including TATE, The New Art Gallery Walsall, ICA, Kunsthaus Zürich, Hay-ward Gallery Touring, Art on the Underground and Royal Academy of Arts.

Prepositions enacts a distinction between what language says and what it does. A catalogue of exercises, interviews, essays and creative explorations, this workbook-compendium invites the reader to investigate how we practise empathy, understanding, and contact, by learning and teaching all at once. Building on the archive of Montez Press Radio show Tongue and Cheek, and featuring work from a stellar cast of previous participants in the broader project, Prepositions asks us what active and embodied participation really means, not just in teaching, but across a whole life.

This book will change your body—and your mind. Prepositions is a set of bite-sized propositions for being and thinking otherwise. Put it under your tongue and see what happens.
— Leah Pires

This compendium of witty exercises, moving personal reflections, curious propositions, and carefully selected graphics invites readers to explore what it means to inhabit a book. It is the product of many hands, a polyphonic choir, filled with immense care and a deep sense of friendship. As one feels its weight, moves around it, folds its pages, breaths with it, or reads it out aloud, one begins to wonder: what does the book need to be completed?
Prepositions—inscribed in the tradition of works as disparate as Robert Filliou’s Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts and CAConrad’s poetry rituals—is an exercise of radical pedagogy and readership. Everyone who enters this book becomes part of its contents.
— Alice Centamore

Radical Rediscoveries: Performance Texts from the Women’s Theatre Movement 1969–1987 is the first of three volumes by Unfinished Histories as part of Montez Press imprint Scores, in collaboration with the Associate Artists programme at London Performance Studios. This collection brings together six seminal works of British alternative feminist and women’s theatre from the archive, with a contextual introductory text by Dr. Susan Croft, co-founder of Unfinished Histories.

The play texts included are: Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven by Jane Arden (1969), Go West Young Woman by Pam Gems (1974), Ophelia by Melissa Murray (1979), Minutes by Hesitate & Demonstrate (1979), Room by Natasha Morgan (1981) and The Wind of Change by Winsome Pinnock (1987).

From its anatomy and autonomy to its death and diet, this issue focuses on the motif Body and all its meanings, direct and indirect, for instance as in relation to human and non-human bearers of bodies, its inhabitants like bacteria and organs, its social, medical and juridical conditions, its intoxications, chemical processes, traumas, transitions, well-being, replacements, weaknesses, and its opposites.

Within the format of a magazine, each page of Pfeil represents the floor, walls, or ceiling which together create an imagined room displaying a printed exhibition. Each issue is dedicated to a specific word, and artists are invited and given space to work on and with this term, and to construct or deconstruct the architecture around it. Combined, the contributions transform into an organic display surrounding the leitmotif.

Moments Before the Wind is a heterogeneous collection of notes on scenography that offers a glimpse into the poetics and artistic practice of Jozef Wouters. These reflections on space, scenography, art making and institutional critique have developed over the years as they were written out loud in various contexts. Now settling on the page among built and unbuilt spaces, they’re an invitation to the reader to think along or against, and think up space for oneself. Edited by Jeroen Peeters; graphic design by Filiep Tacq.

Jozef Wouters is a scenographer and theatre maker based in Brussels, who develops work in collaboration with his Decoratelier. Decoratelier is also a workplace for set designers and artists, and provides room for cross-disciplinary ventures and social experiment.

In 2015, artist Patty Chang (1972) followed the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, the longest aqueduct in the world, which brings water from southern to northern China. While walking, she collected her urine in plastic bottles, drinking their contents before refilling them, in turn drawing a connection between the large-scale infrastructural attempt to control the flow of water and the uncontrollable flows of her own body. Once back in Boston, Chang began making a series of portable urinary devices from discarded plastic bottles, which were then hand-blown in New York by glass-blower Amy Lemaire. In fashioning them from discarded plastic and rendering them permanent in glass, the devices channel Chang’s unfolding ruminations on water as a point of connection between geopolitics, human excess and waste. Designed by Sabo day, this indexical publication is the first book dedicated to depicting the series of sixty-four sculptures in its entirety. It was published on the occasion of Patty Chang’s exhibition at A Tale of A Tub, which ran from September 14–November 3, 2024.

Afternoon Editions no. 1: an essay by Jeroen Peeters titled Reseeding the library, gleaning readership. In May 2017, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine settled during three weeks in the Ravenstein Gallery in Brussels as part of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Invited as a writer in residence, Jeroen Peeters visited the library of living books on a daily basis and recorded his observations by hand in a notebook, which formed the basis for Afternoon Edition #1. Reseeding the library, gleaning readership is an essay on the seed library, on the dispersion of literature through wind, water and animals, on biodiversity and commoning at the heart of readership. On the cover a drawing by Wouter Krokaert of a Philodendron Xanadu. Published May 2018.